Alexander Skarsgård’s kinky biker drama Pillion leads our latest film review roundup
From steamy BDSM biker romances to gothic monsters and quirky heist tales, this winter's film slate has something for every cinephile
By Guy Lodge
Alexander Skarsgård turns up the heat in Pillion, a bold and surprisingly tender story of dom-sub desire, while Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein brings lavish visuals and powerhouse performances from Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi.
Meanwhile, Kelly Reichardt offers a slyly comic twist on the heist genre in The Mastermind, and classic queer cinema reminds us how far representation has come with Dirk Bogarde in Victim.
From steamy BDSM biker romances to gothic monsters and quirky heist tales, this winter’s film slate has something for every cinephile. Here’s what Attitude says is worth watching.
Pillion
Skarsgård as the leader of a gay London biker gang, training a young sub for a BDSM relationship? For many of us, Pillion might sound uncannily like a big-screen adaptation of our private fantasies. And for sheer straight-up Tom of Finland hotness, it delivers on that promise. Not only does Skarsgård fill out those biker leathers very nicely indeed, but we get a tasty glimpse of the goods underneath, complete with PA piercing. (It’s a prosthetic, but who’s complaining?)
Yet despite these sleazy trappings, the big surprise of this accomplished debut feature from British writer-director Harry Lighton is how, well, sweet it is. It may be a queer and sometimes raucously candid study of the power dynamics in a dom-sub relationship, but it gradually grows into a tender and hard-earned love story, as two partners negotiate a path to intimacy around their respective insecurities and psychological blockades.
After they lock eyes in a local pub, Skarsgård’s alpha biker Ray initially treats shy, naive traffic warden Colin (Harry Melling) as an object, forcing him to sleep on the floor at the foot of his bed. Colin is initially exhilarated — subservience, in that curious IYKYK way, increases his sense of self-worth. But eventually he wants more, and the limits of both men are poignantly tested.
It’s not a story we’ve seen often on screen, and Lighton articulates it to outsiders with warm emotional clarity alongside a playful sense of kink. Skarsgård and Melling, meanwhile, each bring a very different kind of vulnerability to the table, making for an odd couple you genuinely want to see get closer.
It’s surely the most romantic film ever made, in which our two lovers’ first night together ends with the line: “Buy yourself a butt plug. You’re too tight.” Unexpected, but refreshingly relatable.
Frankenstein
Cinema isn’t short on adaptations of Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic novel, but if anyone’s going to give us another one, it may as well be fantasy maestro Guillermo del Toro. On paper, and indeed on screen, his new version looks perfect: Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi are inspired casting as, respectively, deranged scientist Victor Frankenstein and his tragic creation. Both actors bring dignity and pathos to this well-worn tale, and the film’s visual design is as lavish and dizzying as you’d want from del Toro. But why isn’t it more thrilling? At two-and-a-half hours, the film feels overstuffed and weighed down, as if the director couldn’t bear to let any fine detail go.
The Mastermind
As an established master of American minimalism, with her films usually less rooted in plot than in time and place and mood, Kelly Reichardt isn’t the first person you’d think would make a heist movie. But that unexpected, off-kilter energy is appropriate in this wonderful, laconic story of a man you’d think wouldn’t be able to pull off a heist. Josh O’Connor is a scruffy, shuffling delight as average 1970s family man James, who decides to rob his small town’s art museum for seemingly no other reason than he can — except he can’t, not really. So perfectly immersed in its period it’s as if it was found in a vault, this is a slyly comic, gently autumnal tale of frustrated wishes for a larger life.
Victim (Queer Classic)
The 1960s Brit-biker classic The Leather Boys stands out as the perfect pairing for Pillion, but it’s currently unavailable to stream. So, for a very different sense of how gay life here has evolved in the past 60-odd years, check out this riveting, groundbreaking psychological thriller from 1961, the first British film to directly and sympathetically address homosexual identity. Dirk Bogarde plays a closeted barrister whose life and livelihood are threatened when he’s enmeshed in a gay blackmail case — that the actor himself was queer and not publicly out brings particularly heady subtext to the drama here, and the film remains taut and tense to this day.
Subscribe to Attitude magazine in print, download the Attitude app, and follow Attitude on Apple News+. Plus, find Attitude on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X and YouTube.
